According to Sigmund Freud, the id represents a personality structure's immediate desires and pleasures, expressed unconsciously. It makes sense, then, that "Id Engager," the final track from Of Montreal's forthcoming long-player, Skeletal Lamping, concerns itself with the engagement of hedonistic impulses. Bandleader and possible schizophrenic Kevin Barnes detailed the fracturing of one's personality through pleasure and pain on last year's disco-tastic Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, and on this skittering, hyper-melodic track, he makes a plea to his constituency: "Ladies/I'm screaming out to you/From the depths of this phallo-centric tyranny."

Soon enough, the wordiness of the cognitive ego gives way to Barnes' true id, as he coos in erotically overlapping falsettos, "I can't help it if it's true/Don't want to be your man/I just want to play with you," in an attitude reversed from Hissing Fauna's conflicted sexual repression. Just when your feet start to hit the sublimely suppressive groove, the track crashes into a disorientingly dreamy shoegaze coda. It's Kevin Barnes' head -- we're all just trying to crawl inside it and hope to stay for a while.

Now Hear This: "Id Engager" (DOWNLOAD MP3)

By Larry Fitzmaurice